We all know about Leviathan, the mighty sea serpent, Ziz, the colossal bird, and Behemot, the giant land beast, but they aren’t alone in the bestiary of Jewish legend.
There are others, marvelous ones, like the re’em (רְאֵם). Think of it as an ancient, gigantic animal, a mythical ox or unicorn, existing as only a single pair. According to the legends, if there were more than two re’em, well, let's just say things might get a little… unstable for the rest of us.
The fascinating thing about the re’em is how rarely they… well, re’em! We're told that they only mate once every seventy years. Can you imagine? The Zohar tells us that God deliberately placed the male and female re’em at opposite ends of the earth – one in the east, the other in the west. Talk about long-distance relationships!
And it gets even wilder. The act of mating itself is… fatal. The female re’em bites the male, and he dies from the wound. Harsh, right? But life finds a way, as they say.
She becomes pregnant, and then carries those babies for a minimum of twelve years. Twelve years! Just picture that.
The year before she gives birth, she becomes completely immobile. Imagine being stuck, unable to move, and starving. But even here, there's a touch of the miraculous. Her own saliva, flowing copiously, irrigates the land around her, causing it to bring forth enough food to sustain her. As we find in Midrash Rabbah, nature itself bends to ensure her survival!
For a whole year, she can only roll from side to side, until finally, her belly bursts, and the twins – a male and a female – are born. Their appearance marks the death of the mother re’em. She makes room for the new generation, which is destined to suffer the same fate as the one that came before. Immediately after birth, one goes eastward, the other westward, only to meet again after seventy years, propagate, and perish. It's a cycle of life and death on a truly epic scale.
According to Ginzberg's retelling in Legends of the Jews, a traveler once claimed to have seen a day-old re’em. He described it as being four parasangs tall (a parasang is an ancient Persian unit of distance, roughly equivalent to 3-4 miles), and its head as being one and a half parasangs long. Its horns? A mere one hundred ells (an ell being an old English unit of measurement, around 45 inches) with an even greater height. These are beings of truly awe-inspiring proportions.
What does this tell us? Is it just a fantastical tale, or is there something deeper at play? Perhaps it's a reminder of the delicate balance of nature, the cycles of life and death, and the sheer, overwhelming power that exists in the world – power that must be carefully managed, or it could overwhelm us all.